Science for Alaska Lecture Series

This is a free all ages public lecture. 

For Alaskans, snow is about as common a substance as there is. Yet, snow exhibits many uncommon properties. For example, snow falls out of the sky as individual grains, but once on the ground turns into a tough, well-bonded material, something sand in a desert will not do.  Individual snowflakes recrystallize after they have landed, and continue to do so throughout the winter growing ten times larger in the process. Rain falling on snow (becoming all too common in Fairbanks now) doesn’t just ice the snow surface….it can make multiple ice layers inside the snow pack.  I will discuss these and other strange and interesting behavior shown by snow, and which give rise to many of the features of the winter landscape in Alaska.